OpenAI adds parental controls and ‘child in distress’ alerts to ChatGPT

Yesterday, OpenAI announced that it will be introducing new parental controls in ChatGPT within a month. The feature will allow parents to link their own accounts to those of their teenage children and control how the AI chatbot can be used by them.

Among other things, the memory and chat history features can be switched off via parental controls, and the system can also send automatic notifications to the parent if it detects that a child is in “acute distress.”

OpenAI also states that more security features are on the way in the next 120 days as part of a broader effort to make ChatGPT safer to use, and these initiatives are “guided by experts.”

The launch of parental controls comes after OpenAI was sued in a high-profile case in which the parents of a teenage suicide victim claim that ChatGPT helped him plan and go through with his suicide.